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This work focuses on biodegradable packaging and edible coatings applied to fresh-cut fruits and vegetables and their effects on the product quality. Practical applications are mainly limited to the use of biodegradable materials that, however, do not allow full control of the product moisture loss. Better results can be achieved by the combined use of biodegradable packagings with edible coatings and recent research has shown that enrichment with silver-montmorillonite nanoparticles may be a promising technique. However, the actual utilization of these materials is still limited, due to the high costs of the raw materials and the limited production.

Recently, technological innovations have been geared to supporting environmental sustainability, also in the fruit and vegetable industry. The application of ozone in the cold storage of fruits and vegetables is a sustainable technology used to improve product quality and its antimicrobial effect, simple use, and characteristic of not leaving any residue, makes this treatment suitable for many applications in this field. The aim of this work was to evaluate the effect of refrigeration at 4°C, associated with ozonization treatment at a concentration of 0.2 ppm on the shelf life of fresh-cut lettuce, compared to a lettuce control stored only at 4°C. Lettuce quality throughout the storage period (7 days) was determined by means of color and microbiological indexes, such as total bacterial count, total coliforms, Escherichia coli, Pseudomonadaceae, yeasts and molds. The lettuce used in the experiment was found to have a low microbiological load. Microbiological results obtained at different storage times have shown that the use of ozone is effective in containing microbial growth during chilling storage of the raw material compared to the refrigerated control. In particular, the positive effects of ozonation were appreciable after the third day of storage. Furthermore, the ozone treatment did not affect the color of the product.

The problem of solving an infinite system of linear equations finitely expressed is addressed. Modifications of the Gauss-Seidel method are presented, especially suitable for the implementation of SMP machines with a small number of processors. One of the proposed parallel algorithms, which concentrates the computational efforts where they are most needed, results to be more efficient than the sequential algorithm, even from the point of view of the total number of operations.

The computational cost, in the bit model of computation, of the evaluation of a real function in a point is analyzed, when the number d of correct digits of the result increases asymptotically. We want to study how the cost depends on also when approaches a critical point for the function f. We investigate the hypotheses under which it is possible to give upper bounds on the cost as functions of “separated variables” d and , that is as products of two functions, each of one variable. We examine in particular the case of elementary functions.

The computational cost of a bracketing algorithm in the bit model of computation is analyzed, when working with a finite arithmetic of unbounded accuracy. The complexity measure used here is the number of bit operations, seen as a function of the required absolute error of the result. In this model the convergence of the classical bisection method (as well as that of any bracketing method which requires the function sign) is not ensured when no information on the behaviour of the function is available. A modified bisection algorithm with guaranteed convergence is proposed and an upper bound to its computational cost is given.

This paper presents a Mathematica implementation of a recent algorithm for efficient high precision automatic quadrature. Extensive numerical testing has been performed on a comprehensive set of functions showing that our algorithm is more efficient than the built-in Mathematica Gauss-Kronrod quadrature algorithm. 1 Introduction We consider the problem of computing an approximation of a definite integral by using an automatic integration routine. In a couple of recent papers [1,2] a new algorithm was introduced (Double Adaptive Quadrature, hereafter DAQ) which is suitable for high precision adaptive automatic quadrature. The basis of DAQ, in a general adaptive scheme, is the combination of the two main strategies to improve the approximation of an integral, namely interval subdivision and application of more accurate formulas. The active subintervals are stored in a q